Many Web pages on the World Wide Web display phone and fax numbers to enable telephonic contact with various vendors and organizations maintaining the Web pages. In addition to presenting a pure number representation, telephone numbers are often listed on Web pages using an alphanumeric representation of the telephone number that provides an alternative representation of the telephone number on the 12-button standard telephone keypad. For example, an Internet Web page for the Web page for International Business Machines Corporation at “http://www.ibm.com” displays a telephone number as “1-888-IBM-HELP,” instead of using an all-number telephone representation.
Unfortunately, the use of alphanumeric representations of telephone numbers can cause difficulties for end users. Most telephone users are accustomed to using the 12-button keypad when dialing an all-numeric telephone number, but have difficulty locating the correct key corresponding to alphabet letters. For users who are good with numbers, an alphanumeric representation of the phone number is not user friendly and forces the user to do a translation or conversion of the number to a numeric representation before dialing the telephone number. This problem is compounded for users who are unfamiliar with the English language alphabet, and would prefer other native mappings of the 12-button keypad, such as the Indian languages or Chinese or Kanji, etc. One solution to these problems is to display telephone numbers in both numeric and alphabetic, or a mixed alphanumeric format, on each of the Web pages. However, this is a cumbersome solution that unnecessarily takes away valuable display area within the Web page. What is needed is a solution that does not take up additional display area on the Web page and displays telephone numbers in the format preferred by each individual end user.